Background Sugarcane is a major crop worldwide as raw material for sugar and ethanol production. Drought is one of the most limiting factor that affects sugarcane productivity. In order to understand the mechanisms of drought response, field and greenhouse assays were conducted with two droughtcontrasting sugarcane genotypes (IACSP94-2094/tolerant and IACSP97-7065/sensitive), and several genes up/downregulated under drought stress identified by microarrays and RNAseq analyses. Ten differential expressed genes in both assays were evaluated by qPCR [1], and three of them showed the transcriptional profile related drought tolerance: aLipoxygenase (ScLOX), acting in the biosynthesis of the jasmonic acid precursor, and recent studies showed their role in defense against drought stress [3]; bDehydrin, correlated to drought stress and associated to maintenance of turgor cells, [2]; cDirigent-jacalin, associated to resistance disease and abiotic stress tolerance [4] and also related to jasmonic acid, an important hormone on plant defense. These genes were chosen as target for functional analyses in rice and sugarcane transgenic plants.